By Aleksandra Pawlik, Research Software Community Consultant.

Last month saw Berlin host the international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB). Taking place at the same time was the Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2013).

Carole Goble, one of the Software Sustainability Institute's Co-Investigators,  gave a keynote speech called  Results may vary: what is reproducible? why do open science and who gets the credit? Carole said that the rapid development of, and easy access to, computing tools and datasets is not enough to make reproducibility easier to achieve. It also requires a change in attitudes, practices and how academia interprets and awards achievement. 

Since the first BOSC event in 2000, the importance and number of open-source bioinformatics projects has been growing constantly along with the community around them. BOSC is co-organised and sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a "non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community."

BOSC featured a wide range of presentations and concluded with a panel discussion titled "Strategies for funding and maintaining open source software," with Carole Goble as one of the panelists.

The presentations were grouped in six sessions - Open Science and Reproducible Research, Cloud and Parallel Computing, Genome-scale Data Management, Visualisation, Software Interoperability, Translational Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics Open Source Project Updates. There were also three Birds of a Feather sessions: OBF project affiliation discussion, Bioinformatics in the Cloud: services and tools for reproducible open bioinformatics and, finally, Visualization: how can the open source community help develop biological data visualizations?

The first BOSC keynote speaker was Cameron Neylon, the Director of the Public Library of Science Advocacy, who talked about "Network ready research: The role of open source and open thinking." This talk covered a wide range of subjects, including the importance of using the right tools to support both open software and science. Sean Eddy, the group leader of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, then discussed "Biological sequence analysis in the post-data era". He pointed out that the current push for innovation in the research community weakens sustainability , as well as "robust software and datasets that may enable even more innovative science over the long term".

As such, the notion of openness, be it open science, open data or open source software, was a major theme throughout the event. Fittingly then, there were even some half-whispered suggestions to change the event's name from "Bioinformatics Open Source Conference" to the "Bioinformatics Open Science Conference."